Musings on World events from the perspective of a Social and an Economic Liberal.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The Honeybee flies home

As we lead up to February 24th, Estonia's national day, I find myself thinking of last years song festival, and one of the more beautiful songs in the incredible choral tradition of Estonia is a setting of a poem by Juhan Liiv, as follows:

4 comments:

Yes the people of Croydon which is about the same size have a similarly emotional song with which they describe the deep feelings of loyalty that beauteous land of Southern Fried chicken , sports wear and Binge drinking . I have tried to translate but I cannot do justice to the original dialect which is perhaps fortunately unintelligible to the modern Croydonian .

The wild pony he galloped in the windSo wild and free/wilful mastering and mastered in his joy/spiritual contentment Then he fell into a smelly ditchHis legs were broken For a while he struggledFinally the stinking and stagnant waters came to seem just as good As the gallops he dreamt/imagined stillAs the death was long one He convinced finally himself it was great place Even relishing his own faecesHappy pony We salute youOh CroydonYou are my ditch

I tell you C the sound of 30,000 people belting that out would bring a tear to your eye . Does me

After the invasion of Estonia (on the same day as Dunkirk fell) Stalin ordered all the leaders of Estonia to be shot or exiled, mostly to Siberia. In the end nearly a third of the 1939 population were shot or exiled or fled.

The population loss so horrified even the Communists that no official census was published for thirty years. When it was the population was the same number- 1.3 million- however instead of 90% Estonians, there were only 60%.

For fifty years even wearing the blue black white colours would get you ten years in the Gulag.

Almost everyone your see in the film- 30,000 in the choir and 100,000 in the crowd had someone in their immediate family who went to the camps- some indeed were sent themselves.

Singing for freedom means a bit more when you know what it means to lose it.

I may seem a bit po-faced, but it's just not funny to make a joke about what the victims of Stalin underwent.It may not be a great translation, but you probably wouldn't make jokes about the holocaust. The only difference between National Socialism and Soviet Socialism was that Stalin killed more people, more brutally for a lot longer.Russia, unlike Germany, does not even acknowledge the crimes committed by its predecessor state, still less does it seek to make amends for them.And that really is NOT funny.